Floe Edge at The Canada Gallery

He is the Walrus (2015) by Ningeokuluk Teevee (detail)

The area of Arctic Canada known as Nunavut is notable for being not only the northernmost and least populous territory of Canada but also for its artistic culture which means that, remarkably, a quarter of the adult population of Nunavut are practising artists.

Eighteen artists from this extraordinary and remote region have been brought together in Floe Edge, an exhibition of contemporary Nunavut art on now at The Canada Gallery. The gallery can be found on the Pall Mall side of Canada House, the Canadian High Commission building, which occupies the westside of Trafalgar Square.

The Nunavut artists in Floe Edge demonstrate how the traditional meets the modern in contemporary Inuit life. From Ningeokuluk Teevee’s man-walrus drawing to Niore Iqalukjuak’s digital print photographs of icebergs. And traditional materials find a new form in the humour of the sealskin bikini from Nala Peter and the ultimate elegance of Mathew Nuqingaq’s silver and walrus ivory snow goggles.

Everywhere you can feel the influence of the transitory nature of an environment that is constantly on the move, with its shifting sea ice and walls of ice that rise and fall thirty feet in a single day. Nowhere more so than in Gauge, the 2015 audio-visual work that filmed the temporary art painted directly on ice walls and then erased by nature, the images washed back into the Arctic Ocean. Beautiful and powerful.

Floe Edge: Contemporary Art & Collaborations from Nunavut is on at The Canada Gallery until 30th November 2016.